Panel 2 - Undernutrition and malnutrition in the world

Malnutrition is an imbalance - a deficiency or an excess - in a person's
intake of nutrients and other dietary elements needed for healthy
living. Malnutrition can manifest itself as hunger (or undernutrition),
deficiency in vitamins or minerals, or overfeeding. The World Health
Organization (WHO) estimates that fully half of the human family, some 3
billion people, suffer from malnutrition of one kind or another. One out of
five people in the developing world suffer from the worst of the variants of
malnutrition - hunger.

It is well known that most undernutrition among the poor arises from
inequitable food access, rather than from inadequate food production. More
than enough food is produced the world over to feed the entire human
population, but too much of it is not consumed directly by needy humans but
used as animal feed. Despite this, demand for meat and milk in developing
countries has been increasing dramatically.

This panel examines the impact of consumption of animal food on malnutrition,
with a special focus on undernutrition in the developing countries. Over the
last decades, a number of private and public institutions have been actively
promoting the spread of large-scale livestock and dairy production in
developing countries; because animal products are among the least efficient
food sources available, this policy, far from combating hunger, will only
exacerbate the problem.